The piece, re-written by a researcher at the Pioneer Institute — a right-wing think tank known for staffers who have worked under various Republican governors’ administrations in recent years — suggests The Taxpayer Protection Act, commonly referred to as “The Pacheco Law” is costing the state, specifically the MBTA, savings. That claim is patently false, just as it was the first time it was made.

Massachusetts enacted the Taxpayer Protection Act in 1993 to protect citizens from corporations and Wall Street banks that take over public contracts at higher costs to provide diminished services. The law does not require state managers to overcome “virtually insurmountable obstacles” to outsource work; it merely requires a private entity to demonstrate that it can perform public work of comparable quality at a cost lower ($0.01 or less) than the in-house cost of the state service, before the private contract is executed.

In essence, the law ensures taxpayers that state services are performed with the greatest amount of savings possible. Its goal is to regulate good management, whether it is public or private, that will provide quality services, at the lowest costs, in the best interests of taxpayers — rather than the private interests of corporations in business to make a profit.

One must ask themselves why the Pioneer Institute would want to reform a law that ensures transparency, accountability and efficiency in the procurement of state services, if the Institute “seeks to improve the quality of life in Massachusetts through civic discourse and intellectually rigorous, data-driven public policy solutions based on free market principles, individual liberty and responsibility, and the ideal of effective, limited and accountable government.”